In recent years, airbag devices have become standard equipment for most passenger motor vehicles. The airbag device is a safety device activated in the event of an emergency such as a vehicle collision and inflated and deployed by gas pressure for receiving and protecting an occupant. There are different kinds of airbag devices for various installation locations or uses. For example, a front airbag is provided in the center of the steering at the driver seat in order to protect the occupant of the front seat from an impact mainly in the front-back direction, and a passenger airbag is provided at the instrument panel or any of other locations in the vicinity of a front passenger seat. In addition, a curtain airbag that is inflated and deployed along the side windows is provided on the wall part near the ceiling in order to protect occupants of the front and back seats from a side collision and a subsequent roll over (turn over), and a side airbag that is inflated and deployed just beside an occupant is provided at a side of the seat.
As described above, the conventional front airbag and the passenger airbag are supposed to protect occupants from impacts mainly in the front-back direction of the vehicle. In recent years, however, a number of types of airbags adapted to cope with irregular collisions or impacts including a so-called oblique collision in which an impact is applied obliquely with respect to the front-back direction of a vehicle have been studied. For example, a front passenger seat airbag disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. JPH08-268204 is configured to also cover the vicinity of the center console in the center of the instrument panel. In an oblique collision, an occupant of a front passenger seat may be moved toward the center console positioned obliquely in front of the occupant, and therefore an airbag device adapted to be inflated and deployed in the vicinity of the center console is useful.
The cushion of the airbag device in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. JPH08-268204 however covers the center console and therefore has a shape that expands particularly inwardly in a vehicle-widthwise direction (to the inner side of the vehicle) from its storing location in the instrumental panel. The cushion in the shape expanded locally to the inner side of the vehicle tends to swing in the vehicle-widthwise direction because gas also tends to flow in the vehicle-widthwise direction therein, which may give rise to irregularities in deployment behavior. The airbag device must be quickly inflated and deployed in milliseconds toward target locations, and stable deployment behavior is required for the purpose.
The present invention is in view of the above-described problem, and it is an object of the present invention to provide an airbag device that can be inflated and deployed quickly with more stable deployment behavior.